


Heroes and Cowards

by thelongcon (rainer76)



Category: Fringe
Genre: F/M, Post 5:03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-18
Updated: 2012-10-18
Packaged: 2017-11-16 13:19:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/thelongcon





	Heroes and Cowards

“I love you,” Peter says and grins.  To Olivia’s expert eye, it looks a little dazed. 

“You love my timing.”

“I _adore_ your timing.”

“Up.” 

He staggers, already moving in response.  Olivia catches him under the arm, settles her own shoulder and takes as much weight as she can bear.  It took a long time for Peter to say those words, almost twice as long as Olivia, but she never tires of hearing them.  The quiet surety, how he says it so plainly, stripped bare without hitch or pause.  Oddly, he’s at peace with where he’s found himself.   

Restless and angry, Olivia’s not.  “Hurt?”

He grimaces.  “Concussion, maybe.”

“Double vision?”

“No.”

“Shoulder?”

“It’s good.”

Satisfied, Olivia hands him a gun.  “Stay with me.”  He looks at her sideways.  It’s a request to keep up, curt, because she doesn’t have time for anything else, but it could be an apartment in another universe with comic books hanging from the walls, it could be Olivia cupping his face, fragility in a too-short kiss.  

“Yeah,” he breathes. 

 

***

 

There was a moment during pregnancy, after pregnancy, when Olivia resented Etta, that internal shift from being fixated on her own destiny to another helpless being, and Olivia had looked at Etta’s scrunched up face, too big head, too small body, and thought:  This isn’t me.  It’s not what I’m meant for.  She thought, terrified: What if I hurt her?

Cycles perpetuate.  It wasn’t Walter’s fate that befell Peter but his natural parents – recast as Walternate - it wasn’t death they faced rather the silent bedroom of a stolen child.  Certainty, Olivia knows, while harsh and final is ultimately a blessing.  Olivia saw that scenario play out in two fashions – how Elizabeth and Walternate were with each other, in the reality where Peter was missing – versus how they were when they knew, definitively, that their son had drowned.

She’s dead, Olivia decides, and it’s like putting her hand in coal-fire, cauterising a wound.  Etta’s dead.  She has to be.

It’s final, vicious, and she can feel herself realign toward the fight, the Observers, the things that need to be done; her sense of destiny come to fruition.  She’ll give Peter Maine, watch him travel onward by himself, and when he returns, Olivia needs to react.  Come to New York with me, she says gently, when he’s bleary-eyed and shaking, we need to do something.

Their separation, initially, is peaceful.  He calls once a week with progress reports – the places he’s been, the security check-points and borders he ghosts across – the list of places he’s shortening; until Olivia tells him one day not to bother.  The Observer’s are closing in: his weekly reports are a liability that could get them caught if traced, that jeopardise Walter, Astrid, and everyone else at war.  The hurt, accusations on both sides, don’t come till later. 

There was a moment during pregnancy, after pregnancy, during one thousand one hundred and thirty-one days, where Olivia had looked at Etta and thought I love you.  She thought it as easily as Peter said it, naked and raw, half in wonder.  Where she held Etta to her chest, too big head and alien body, and knew her daughter was a perfect miracle.  Where Olivia thought:  What if I hurt you? Leave you alone to pull the trigger? What if I neglect you, and you don’t even realize?

Cycles perpetuate themselves, and Olivia, terrified, thought her role models left a little to be desired.

 

***

 

She knows this stretch of muscle, the underlay of fibres and the knot of tissue.  Peter would sleep on his stomach and Olivia would sprawl on his back, face cushioned between his shoulder blades.  The levator scapulae to the trapezius.  The deltoid to the latissimus dorsi.  She knows this closed in warmth, this scent. 

It’s unseasonably warm in 2036.  He’s sleeping on the floor on top of the covers, the sheets dishevelled beneath him.  Olivia balances on her heels beside the mattress, fingertips dragging between his shoulder blades.  She hears the change in his breathing when he awakens.  “It’s me,” she says, redundantly.

Peter carries his ring with him but doesn’t wear it and Olivia’s locked hers away, somewhere unreachable.  She thinks that’s how they’ve always worn their bruises.  He has a way of looking at her that can make Olivia’s breath catch – it makes her feel both safe and vindicated – and she wants to see herself through Peter’s eyes.  For a minute or two, Olivia wants to rest.  Where she’s selfless, a hero, a mother rolled into one, multi-faceted and beloved; and not the reflection Olivia sees, over-stressed, frayed, keeping it together by a thread. 

He turns his head to study her, voice sleep rough.  “Come here.”  She floats downward.  He drifts backward to make room.  They meet, foreheads touching.  “You’re good with her,” Peter murmurs softly.  Olivia can see the quirk of his half smile, the telling pause as he quotes.  “Despite what you think.”

“Did that line actually work at the time?”

“No.  I didn’t believe it.  But your conviction gave me pause.”

Olivia closes her eyes and thinks it’s true, in reverse as well, a swell of hope as she reminds herself Peter’s always known her best.  She knows this stretch of muscle, this support system, and closes her hand around his nape. 

Peter wasn’t a big conversationalist in bed, at odds with his daily interaction.  It was Olivia who coaxed sex talk, quiet admissions, laughter that could make her whole body shake.  He took direction though, a playful glint in his eye as Olivia rolled them, locked their fingers together or held his wrists down.  He knew when to be supine.

He traces the curve of her cheekbone, feather-light, until his thumb and finger hold her chin, enough weight to part her mouth.  Her eyes are closed, but Olivia knows this kiss, questing, and opens for it.    “I love you,” she repeats.  There was a time, not so long ago (a generation ago), when Olivia thought she was spent. 

Thankfully, he knows when to act, too.  He deepens the kiss, fingers resting in the hollow of her throat, where the collarbones strive to meet.  His thigh pushes between her legs, his opposite hand finds the small of her back.

There was a version of herself once, in some iteration of the world, who didn’t remember Walter Bishop as a child, had no recollection of the experiments performed.  Olivia’s most vivid childhood memory was pulling the trigger on her stepfather (she doesn't kill him, oh she wants to, but in the last second, Olivia lets her aim drop).  There was a version of herself who didn’t believe in fate.  Or bending to the set of circumstances she was raised in, who defined herself by what _she_ chose to do.  Olivia was an investigator – it was who she was, evidenced by the way she partook in her job – the gun was of secondary importance, it was the connections that mattered most.  She’d hunted down and arrested people for doing less than Etta.   Olivia believed that if you didn’t agree with what had been done, then simply put, it wasn’t to be repeated.  And if the nature of her investigations changed, if they were no longer sexual or serial predators, if they were corporate business, extreme science, then it didn’t sway Olivia’s need for  _justice._ Olivia spent twenty odd years saying her stepfather wouldn’t get the better of her – that the writings he left on her skin, in violet, indigo, watery green – wouldn’t be the epilogue to her story, and if that was true, then she saw no reason to accept Walter’s idea of fate.  A simple if/then formula: if she’s not her stepfather’s victim, then she’s not Walter’s toy soldier either. 

Olivia chose to be an _investigator,_ act like an investigator, walk her own path.  There was steel in that person, a thousand yard stare that could make people want to measure up. 

She  _likes_  that person.

There was a version of Olivia, in some iteration of the world who  _did_  remember Walter Bishop, and knew about the experiments.  Who heard the word ‘fate’ in whispers down the hallway; and shivered every time Doctor Bishop crooned ‘Our Olive” with proprietary.  Olivia ran away before the cortexiphan trials could be completed and in some ways, she’s been running ever since.  

When Peter appeared, the other Olive was within reach – the one with steel in her spine, who never dodged anything - Olivia knew which version she preferred.  It wasn’t entirely about love – and it wasn’t all about Peter - but it might have been easier for Walter and Lincoln to believe so, to roll their eyes and dismiss her as a love-struck teenager.  Heroes and cowards, she muses tiredly, and all the muddy ground in between.

Peter’s her exact opposite, and exactly the same.  He sees cowardice in his own choices and strength in his partner. He’s the one thing Olivia recognises, intimately.  He told her, cheekily, that single dimension’s don’t interest him, he’s lived in four, after all.  He told her once, in all seriousness, Olivia’s the strongest, most beautiful person he’s seen.  “I want this,” she whispers, against the shell of his ear. 

In the opposite room, she hears Etta’s quiet laugh, Astrid’s voice, Walter’s answering murmur.

Peter rolls them until Olivia’s under him, partially smothered.  Secured under his weight; thigh riding hard against her crotch.  Peter’s fingers tighten in her scalp. His kisses change, the dialect no longer tentative. She listens to every off-key harmony; arches her spine and hooks her feet around his calves.  Olivia presses both hands against his buttocks, rocks her hips to bring them together.

She wants to take a page from Peter’s book tonight.  She doesn’t want to waste any more time. 

He doesn’t like metal or steel, prefers the natural lay of fibre, the covetous curve of rope.  Olivia’s had satin against her skin.  She’s ridden him, a lazy twitch of her hips, keeping Peter on edge until he broke.  Tell me what you’re thinking, she’ll whisper, and he opens like a flood-gate.  

She’s impatient now, and this is frottage, they move together in sync. 


End file.
